Tongue Wag at KWAG

An online project by Linda Duvall

Launched in Summer 2006

The fourth installment of the Vernacular Series is Great Expectations, a web-based project by Linda Duvall, commissioned by KW|AG.

Between 2004 and 2005, artist Linda Duvall set up a booth at the entrance of KW|AG to conduct interviews with visitors (entitled Tongue Wag at KW|AG) during The River: Grand! exhibition and also traced the behavioral patterns of visitors during the annual Grand National quilt exhibition. The project is comprised of Duvall’s documentation of her observations and includes exhibition images related to these observations.

KW|AG’s strives to act as a catalyst in the community for developing artistic endeavours and creating new relationships. To achieve this we often invite an artist to become engaged in a project (and subsequently our community), and to respond to it in the vocabulary of their own artistic practice.

The initial impetus to invite the artist Linda Duvall to create a project for the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery came as a result of her participation in CAFKA.05:[probing into the distance] and her analytic project relating to passers by in the environs of Kitchener City Hall. After discussion with the artist an invitation was extended to undertake a new art venture that would utilize the context of the gallery and give voice to the visitor, providing a cross section of the dialogue between the institution and the individual.

Duvall’s art practice has consistently maintained an interest in the material and transformative qualities of human social interaction. An outcome of this project is an insight into the expectations and reflections that visitors bring to the gallery and often lays bare the distance between the institutional intentions and the actual visitor experience. Within the text component of the project, a dialogue with the visitor responses has been created by interspersing comments from the gallery perspective.

In utilizing the methods of art and artistic practice the gallery has opened the context of itself and the visitor to an artist’s examination and final manifestation as a web project.

For a week, Duvall sat in a booth meeting every visitor to the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery (KWAG).

Introductory Page to Tongue Wag at KWAG online project

Pages from Web Project, showing some of the responses.